With the development of science and technology and the acceleration of the pace of life, there is a more and more urgent desire for people to be liberated from housework of daily meals. Therefore, “convenient food” has become a well-selling product in the shopping place or market. Convenient food, also referred as to pre-packed food or semi-finished food, is a product obtained by vacuum-packing or quick-freezing food in a sterile environment after the food has been subject to such processing operations as cleaning up (e.g., removing unusable part, splitting, or the like), washing, sterilizing and flavoring.
With the development of convenient food processing technology and information technology, a digital menu used for convenient food product has emerged as the time requires. Theoretically, a digital menu for convenient food is a cooking program having a universal standard format obtained by processing the cooking processes performed by chefs of various cooking styles on convenient food. The application of digital menu for convenient food has met cooking requirements of consumers on various convenient foods when using smart cooking appliance. That is, after the consumer has bought convenient food product, a cooking process of the convenient food can be completed automatically or semi-automatically on smart cooking appliance under the guidance of a digital menu corresponding to this convenient food product, thus greatly improving the automation level in kitchen cooking.
The digital menu is a digital product which has such characteristics as convenient movement and reproduction. Therefore, the producer of digital menu cannot manage the authorized use of digital menu like managing the ownership for conventional physical products. Based on the characteristics of digital products, the rights of digital menu producer can be really protected only if an authorization management can be conducted on each copy of the digital menu produced by the digital menu producer. Meanwhile, one of more material objects of convenient food product produced by convenient food producer according to the specification of convenient food product can be also considered as a reproduction of the specification of convenient food product. When different convenient food products are sold to different users, it can be also considered that the authorizations of these convenient food products are also transferred differently. However, there is currently no ideal solutions for the problem of how to obtain usage authorization of a matching digital menu through different convenient food products when these different convenient food products are used, or how to obtain matching convenient food product information through different digital menu instantiations when using these different digital menu instantiations for convenient food.
Moreover, during use of digital menu for convenient food, there is currently no apparatus which can supervise and manage authorizations of convenient food or digital menu effectively, i.e., to record convenient food or digital menu that has been ran/used, or to determine the legitimacy of used convenient food or digital menu.
Therefore, there is a need for an authorization control method which overcomes the authorization management problem in application of existing convenient food and digital menu; meanwhile, there is also a need for an apparatus which can conduct effective supervision and management on the authority of executed digital menu.